Chat? Trillian Maybe? Works for me.
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
I've been using Trillian on my PC and my iPhone for ages, and it works perfectly. No native iPad app yet, but it works fine on the iPad in doublewide mode. I'm sure its just a short hop to a beefed up main version. Works with Jabber/Aim/MSN/ICQ/Gtalk and can even deal with twitter and email if you want it to.
If I run a grocery store, I'm allowed to say what kinds of checks I'll take.
If I run a coffee shop, I get to decide who'se posters stay on the bulletin board.
If I run an actual, physical auction house, I'm allowed to say "all payments run through the house." In fact that's what all physical auction houses DO say.
There's nothing "free as in speech" about a service like eBay. It's a commercial enterprise. They could demand payment in chickens and the ONLY right anyone has is to simply say no and not use them.
It's a very sensible document (and HSPD12 is just the mandate, FIPS201 is the implementation). All it does (ALL) is say "agencies need to have a process in place to make sure Joe is Joe, and they need to give him a card that says he's Joe, and it needs to look like this."
It doesn't actually go further than that. It outlines an interoperable infrastructure based on dirt simple, well understood, highly tested smart card stock, lays out minimum requirements for readers, and puts a system certification process in place. The "tech" part of this is really quite simple and boring for anyone who's spent more than 10 minutes thinking about PKI or smartcards.
The much much more important part of this is the credentialling part (PIV-1) which has been in place for a year. This establishes clear lines of responsibility and clear processes for actually establishing that Joe is Joe, and at least an attempt to make sure that, say, the Defense Manpower Data Center is using the same process as the Janitor's closet in the Department of Education. This is a GOOD THING people. It's about breaking down silos and creating (gasp) an open standard for strong(er) authentication.
That's right folks, an open interoperability standard sponsored by the US of A. Wanna make sure your corporate ID is just a wee bit futureproof? Read the FIPS201 docs and mimic the data model and tech requirements.
OK, back to the sarcasm laced punditry. Thank's for playing.
Seriously. If this was truly being disruptive, I wonder if she just asked. "I'd appreciate it if those of you using laptops might try taking a day off so we can interact a little better. I'll put my lecture notes online tonight."
I'm hard pressed to imagine a class full of people going batty over it.
And in her defense - I know how many classes I've spaced out on because I was doing something completely irrelevant on my laptop...
Yaknow, stuff like this always surprises me. First off, pre-marketing at CES is generally a waste of time - an article by Mossberg only matters if consumers can go buy the darn thing, and they can't. Worse, why in the world would sony try to market against the Xbox 360 LAUNCH. They're much better off holding all their Ammo until it can really go out.
Everyone disses sony. Look back a whiel ago and read all of the posts about how the PS2 would never catch on. Seriously, go dredge some forums. Guess what, PS2 games took a while to develop and grab hold.
PSP games CAN rock, and some of them DO rock. I just spent an entire day travelling and burned away 5-6 hours of my day playing all these "horrible" games for the system - like Lumines and Mercury and Gripshift and THUG. The system freakin' rocks.
Sure, the DS is nice too. So is the PS2, and the Xbox 360. But to sit here and proclaim Sony's death because they don't blow their wad on CES, an increasingly irrelevant forum for actual marketing, seems silly.
I spent the christmas holiday playing on a DS of my cousins. Yes, its cool, and some of the new games are fun (advance wars in particular) - but when the sales hit after new years, I went out and bought a PSP instead.
I think there is room in the market for both of them, honestly, and I don't count out any console until its had some substantial time in the market. On purchase I bought Lumines, Mercury, GTA, THUG and Gripshift. Everyone of these is an excellent game - so I have a hard time with the "the games suck." Yes, there aren't a ton of titles, but I like what I see in the pipeline, and it's hard to argue with SOCOM online play.
Will the DS outsell the PSP on units sold? I would expect them to, the price points are radically different. From a corporate perspective, Sony could likely sell have as many units and make more profit than Nintendo. The licensing for the games works the same way - higher price points can keep the developers happy.
And I believe the shoe has yet to drop. As the OS releases have shown, the PSP has a LOT under the hood that's yet to be tapped. There's still an IRDA port and a whole pile of internals no one has hacked yet. THe PS3 is launching this year. I expect there to be substantial integration between the two.
I find it funny that everyone assumes there can be only one winner. That the PS2 "won" the market for consoles, and that now the DS will "win" the handheld market. There's room here for many players.
Ah, you mean that "obtain licenses" box - well, you have to go through that setup screen to rip your CD's at all pretty much, and I can't imagine anyone leaving it checked or checking it. My point is just that I have a 10000 entirely legal, entirely ripped library of CDs I've collected over the years. I can't imagine having bought all that and not having unfettered rights to it. On the whole video front though, I keep getting into arguments with zealots who've told me they're going to get every episode of lost at 2 bucks a pop. They just sort of whimper when I point out you can get 24 episodes on DVD for about 25 bucks on ebay.
OK, I'll take the bait. Tell me how WMP is applying DRM to my ripped file? Where is the license being kept? I don't have my computer plugged into the internet (say) - so what magical DRM server in the sky just issued me my key?
I move WMA files all over the place, never once have I run into a DRM issue, and I can just burn it all back to CDs. Don't get me wrong, I wont buy a DRMd song from ANYONE when I can buy a CD and make as many copies as I want, and have a convenient archive already sitting there labeled in a box. CD comes out once, goes back in, sits in the basement forevermore. And guess what - its less than a buck a track most of the time.
I'm convinced that many many people dig iTunes more for what it CAN do, not because it necessarily does it better, more efficiently, or cheaper than the old way. Renting a movie at Blockbuster is still a vastly more economical model than payign 8 bucks for it, unless I plan on watching it more than 3 times. And I guarantee you they ain't gonna let me burn a DVD (in DVD quality) of my 8 dollar movie, even if they give it to me in DVD quality with all the extras (which they wont).
So, I've run/am running sites on mambo, drupal, Postnuke, Xoops, and Wordpress.
WP is superior for simple blogging
Mambo is superior for running a "newsy" kind of site
Postnuke is superior for running a "fanboy" kind of site with lots of galleries, downloads, and discussion boards
I find Drupal interesting - if only because of the wierd taxonomy/node system. I think it's best used for non-traditional creative group writing, but it falls short of the others in their respective categories for numerous reasons. I've also found it SO tightly written that its very difficult to make significant modifications.
Let's face it, 99% of the time when one requires a strong password, the device used to access is a near-constant. I never access my corporate network except from my laptop - period. I never access resources on that network that require a password without already having logged in off said laptop.
So, just authenticate the HARDWARE and the USER once, then ping the hardware for its continued presence. After all, your laptop is a pretty damn big token to misplace - and you are going to be beating on your IT department the nanosecond it's stolen anyway.
Seriously. Trusted Computing is nearly non optional in the future if you are the CEO of a public company. Do you want to be the CEO who sits there on the witness stand and has to answer the question "Did you use all commercially available means to ensure the integrity of private company data?" and explain why you thought Trusted Computing was a bad idea, so you chose to ignore it on grounds of principle?
Heatsink cases are really the best way to deal with this, as anyone over at avsforum will tell you. Get the heat away, then just stick splines all over.
As has been pointed out, the internal rights issues on TV are already enormous - far more so than with Movies or with Music.
The main distinction is geographic. An episode of prime time TV airs at different times in different parts of the world. This is done for numerous reasons, but generally, it results in the US getting the first run, and, say, Australia getting the show a week later - or even a season later.
If all of the sudden you can just download TV, the entire geography centric system dissapears. Local affiliates now have, essentially, no business (a problem they already face in Satellite, as any urban sat subscriber can tell you). Non-US local affiliates, facing the disadvantage of time delay, REALLY have no business now.
So follow it through. Information wants to be free, we all say. So people download Numb3rs anyway, because some guy with a PVR posts it somewhere (generally with the advertising intact). The "if everyone did this" argument essentially bankrupts the system - you may watch the ads, but you can no longer be counted. Advertisers won't pay you. Everyone rebells, overseas rights evaporate, and all of the sudden that show with a 1M per episode budget is simply impossible to fund.
Sure, long term, it's nice to think we could just pay directly for the content, but then we all have to get used to those "DRM" letters we seem to hate so much. Or we could say "but I'll watch the ads" to which the studio will say "yeah right" and force you to use a proprietary play system to ENFORCE you watching the ads.
Umm, this is actually entirely incorrect. Microsoft is REQUIRING TPM hardware on next generation machines (Longhorn). Far from being abandoned, NGSCB is alive and well and coming soon to an update near you.
Love it or leave it's here. Dell started shipments on a substantial portion of their line YESTERDAY. You can stick your head in the sand, your you can help provide solutions. It's up to you.
As someone who has actually played it...
on
DOOM: The Boardgame
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· Score: 1
It's substantially better than Doom 3 the video game. Maybe not as much eye candy, but vastly better gameplay. Kevin Wilson, the designer, is SOLID - he did Game of Thrones - the best wargame in years.
Gameplay is extremely good, and features a pretty innovative dice mechanism and a fair amount of roll playing flair. I played with several folks this weekend who wouldn't touch the videogame, and they were all pretty impressed.
It bogs a little with 4 players, but 2-3 it is truly an excellent game, and one you will be playing long after Doom3 is gathering dust.
I know we are all in love with linux here, and I played with Myth to, but there's a number you are missing here:
Microsoft MCE shipped 1.6 million units last year. Anyone care to guess how many WORKING Myth installations are out there?
It sucks (MCE) it really isn't that great. Putting sage or snapstream on top of Meedio is vastly superior. Myth can get SORT of close, if you are careful, and don't need to talk to any windows machines.
Out of the money options are FAR from worthless, and there's a very large body of economics devoted to this:
http://bradley.bradley.edu/~arr/bsm/model.html Most companies use black scholes (or the public options markets) to price their options for accounting purposes.
Sorry, the math is a LITTLE more complicated than everyone's making it out to be.
Not only is Online more about the math, but low limit online poker (1-2), 5 dollar SnG tourneys, etc. - is populated by the WORST shoot from the hip players. If you simply play simple tight poker, you generally grind out 10 bucks - 20 bucks an hour at those levels.
Once you go to real money - 50 tourneyes, 5-10 games, its very hard to win consistently - everyone at that level KNOWS the math.
Making quality visual content is not cheap and easy. It's MUCH harder than just writing a blog page, or pirating together a radio broadcast from your MP3 collection. Sure the tools make it theoretically easy, but the actual creative componant of making half an hour of something people really want to watch is daunting - this coming from someone who spent years doing it for "the man".
So in order for something like this to work, you need money. Thus, there has to be SOME sort of a business model, and I for one don't think the Public Radio Pledge Drive/paypal donate model is going to work here.
So if you spend money making good content, with the hopes of at least making a little money, guess what folks - DRM. Sorry, but it's true. You are actually going to have to pay for it.
All the comments about bandwidth are also true.
Look how much time and energy goes into making something like Red v. Blue - with no live video at all, and how short and simple it has to be. And call me a cynic, but I don't think those guys are rolling in dough, even with my paltry donation.
My point is that if someone would come out with a COMPONANT encoder that worked, we'd be set. Yes, you would lose a D/A conversion, but MOST people get at least one D/A conversoin between their cable/satellite box and their display anyway (even if they don't know it). Also, I can tell you from extensive testing that I at least can not tell ANY difference between a "direct" digital connection from the STB and a componant transcoded signal...
And QAM doesnt solve the encryption problem. Hence the need for a componant encoder.
It drives me nuts that people keep spending R&D money on Over-the-air tuner cards for HDTV. THere are plenty of these out there, and they all stink.
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we int he real world actually USE (cable and sattelite) into our boxes. Right now there is no way to do this without an insanely expensive Component encoder card.
AT BEST, with your HDTV OTA card you will get marginal quality from a handful of HDTV channels. With satellite or cable you will get dozens of absolutely pure channels - and you can't get them into your PVR.
I credit my pilot's license to flight sim time, definately, particularly navigation, radio management, and procedures. Had little to no impact on the PHYSICAL skill of flying.
However, RC airplane/helicopter simulators are absolutely invaluable. I wouldn't let my friend fly any of my planes till I watched him fly on the sim for an hour, and then he solod. And as far as helis go, anyone who tries to learn WITHOUT a sim is simply insane.
I believe the problem solving helps a lot too.
Re:Well I can say this for one..
on
Build Your Own PVR
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I went through all FOUR major offerings on this front, because, mostly, i didn't have to pay for extra OS licenses.
I built a machine for Myth, for Sage, for Snapstream, and for MCE. In the end, I stuck with snapstream.
MCE is a buggy piece of crap (surprise) SageTV is nice, but fails the pretty/Wife Factor test quite badly, and has plenty of bugs of its own. Snapstream has by far the most "tivolike" interface, and just plain does the job well. Myth, if I NEVER, EVER had to have my wife and kids rely on it, would be nice, but I simply did not find the combo I got with my snapstream install.
If you are JUST going to do PVR, sure, its not THAT hard to get set up. But when you add playing DVD's, pushing a high def signal through a converter, playing MP3s, cutting DVDs from home movies, doing some light websurfing, actuing as the household firewall, the household fileserver, and being a KILLER gaming platform on a nice 50 inch HDTV, you're gonna end up with windows.
Bitch all you want, but add "killer gaming" and "easy to use all the other little crap" to the equation, and windows RAPIDLY becomes worth the license fee.
1: Australia pays an INSANE duty on imported music, to the point that when I lived there a few years ago, CD's from the US and UK cost TWICE as much as local fare. As such, it was ALREADY a culture in which people swapped tapes or (more likely) purchased all their music on overseas trips, particularly to asia, where it was ALL boot.
2: Bandwidth is by the byte.
Put these two together, and the stats don't add up.
Hey, I hate the RIAA as much as everyone else, but it baffles me that people can think that in the CURRENT status quo, the internet hasn't hurt CD sales. I've bought fewer CDs, everyone I know has bought fewer CD's. My babysitter has NEVER bought a CD. Neither the math nor the social motivation makes any sense.
On the other hand, the fact that 1980's CD sales we're likely artificially inflated by people "rebuying" their LP collections, never seems to be mentioned, and of course, just because people are buying fewer CDs doesnt mean they wouldnt follow some OTHER (itunes or whatever) business model.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using Trillian on my PC and my iPhone for ages, and it works perfectly. No native iPad app yet, but it works fine on the iPad in doublewide mode. I'm sure its just a short hop to a beefed up main version. Works with Jabber/Aim/MSN/ICQ/Gtalk and can even deal with twitter and email if you want it to.
If I run a grocery store, I'm allowed to say what kinds of checks I'll take.
If I run a coffee shop, I get to decide who'se posters stay on the bulletin board.
If I run an actual, physical auction house, I'm allowed to say "all payments run through the house." In fact that's what all physical auction houses DO say.
There's nothing "free as in speech" about a service like eBay. It's a commercial enterprise. They could demand payment in chickens and the ONLY right anyone has is to simply say no and not use them.
In case anyone cares to actually LEARN what it is rather than just ramble on about how horrible the world is:
http://csrc.nist.gov/piv-program/index.html
It's a very sensible document (and HSPD12 is just the mandate, FIPS201 is the implementation). All it does (ALL) is say "agencies need to have a process in place to make sure Joe is Joe, and they need to give him a card that says he's Joe, and it needs to look like this."
It doesn't actually go further than that. It outlines an interoperable infrastructure based on dirt simple, well understood, highly tested smart card stock, lays out minimum requirements for readers, and puts a system certification process in place. The "tech" part of this is really quite simple and boring for anyone who's spent more than 10 minutes thinking about PKI or smartcards.
The much much more important part of this is the credentialling part (PIV-1) which has been in place for a year. This establishes clear lines of responsibility and clear processes for actually establishing that Joe is Joe, and at least an attempt to make sure that, say, the Defense Manpower Data Center is using the same process as the Janitor's closet in the Department of Education. This is a GOOD THING people. It's about breaking down silos and creating (gasp) an open standard for strong(er) authentication.
That's right folks, an open interoperability standard sponsored by the US of A. Wanna make sure your corporate ID is just a wee bit futureproof? Read the FIPS201 docs and mimic the data model and tech requirements.
OK, back to the sarcasm laced punditry. Thank's for playing.
Seriously. If this was truly being disruptive, I wonder if she just asked. "I'd appreciate it if those of you using laptops might try taking a day off so we can interact a little better. I'll put my lecture notes online tonight."
I'm hard pressed to imagine a class full of people going batty over it.
And in her defense - I know how many classes I've spaced out on because I was doing something completely irrelevant on my laptop...
Yaknow, stuff like this always surprises me. First off, pre-marketing at CES is generally a waste of time - an article by Mossberg only matters if consumers can go buy the darn thing, and they can't. Worse, why in the world would sony try to market against the Xbox 360 LAUNCH. They're much better off holding all their Ammo until it can really go out.
Everyone disses sony. Look back a whiel ago and read all of the posts about how the PS2 would never catch on. Seriously, go dredge some forums. Guess what, PS2 games took a while to develop and grab hold.
PSP games CAN rock, and some of them DO rock. I just spent an entire day travelling and burned away 5-6 hours of my day playing all these "horrible" games for the system - like Lumines and Mercury and Gripshift and THUG. The system freakin' rocks.
Sure, the DS is nice too. So is the PS2, and the Xbox 360. But to sit here and proclaim Sony's death because they don't blow their wad on CES, an increasingly irrelevant forum for actual marketing, seems silly.
I spent the christmas holiday playing on a DS of my cousins. Yes, its cool, and some of the new games are fun (advance wars in particular) - but when the sales hit after new years, I went out and bought a PSP instead.
I think there is room in the market for both of them, honestly, and I don't count out any console until its had some substantial time in the market. On purchase I bought Lumines, Mercury, GTA, THUG and Gripshift. Everyone of these is an excellent game - so I have a hard time with the "the games suck." Yes, there aren't a ton of titles, but I like what I see in the pipeline, and it's hard to argue with SOCOM online play.
Will the DS outsell the PSP on units sold? I would expect them to, the price points are radically different. From a corporate perspective, Sony could likely sell have as many units and make more profit than Nintendo. The licensing for the games works the same way - higher price points can keep the developers happy.
And I believe the shoe has yet to drop. As the OS releases have shown, the PSP has a LOT under the hood that's yet to be tapped. There's still an IRDA port and a whole pile of internals no one has hacked yet. THe PS3 is launching this year. I expect there to be substantial integration between the two.
I find it funny that everyone assumes there can be only one winner. That the PS2 "won" the market for consoles, and that now the DS will "win" the handheld market. There's room here for many players.
Ah, you mean that "obtain licenses" box - well, you have to go through that setup screen to rip your CD's at all pretty much, and I can't imagine anyone leaving it checked or checking it. My point is just that I have a 10000 entirely legal, entirely ripped library of CDs I've collected over the years. I can't imagine having bought all that and not having unfettered rights to it. On the whole video front though, I keep getting into arguments with zealots who've told me they're going to get every episode of lost at 2 bucks a pop. They just sort of whimper when I point out you can get 24 episodes on DVD for about 25 bucks on ebay.
OK, I'll take the bait. Tell me how WMP is applying DRM to my ripped file? Where is the license being kept? I don't have my computer plugged into the internet (say) - so what magical DRM server in the sky just issued me my key?
I move WMA files all over the place, never once have I run into a DRM issue, and I can just burn it all back to CDs. Don't get me wrong, I wont buy a DRMd song from ANYONE when I can buy a CD and make as many copies as I want, and have a convenient archive already sitting there labeled in a box. CD comes out once, goes back in, sits in the basement forevermore. And guess what - its less than a buck a track most of the time.
I'm convinced that many many people dig iTunes more for what it CAN do, not because it necessarily does it better, more efficiently, or cheaper than the old way. Renting a movie at Blockbuster is still a vastly more economical model than payign 8 bucks for it, unless I plan on watching it more than 3 times. And I guarantee you they ain't gonna let me burn a DVD (in DVD quality) of my 8 dollar movie, even if they give it to me in DVD quality with all the extras (which they wont).
So, I've run/am running sites on mambo, drupal, Postnuke, Xoops, and Wordpress.
WP is superior for simple blogging
Mambo is superior for running a "newsy" kind of site
Postnuke is superior for running a "fanboy" kind of site with lots of galleries, downloads, and discussion boards
I find Drupal interesting - if only because of the wierd taxonomy/node system. I think it's best used for non-traditional creative group writing, but it falls short of the others in their respective categories for numerous reasons. I've also found it SO tightly written that its very difficult to make significant modifications.
All just my opinions of course.
Let's face it, 99% of the time when one requires a strong password, the device used to access is a near-constant. I never access my corporate network except from my laptop - period. I never access resources on that network that require a password without already having logged in off said laptop.
So, just authenticate the HARDWARE and the USER once, then ping the hardware for its continued presence. After all, your laptop is a pretty damn big token to misplace - and you are going to be beating on your IT department the nanosecond it's stolen anyway.
Seriously. Trusted Computing is nearly non optional in the future if you are the CEO of a public company. Do you want to be the CEO who sits there on the witness stand and has to answer the question "Did you use all commercially available means to ensure the integrity of private company data?" and explain why you thought Trusted Computing was a bad idea, so you chose to ignore it on grounds of principle?
Heatsink cases are really the best way to deal with this, as anyone over at avsforum will tell you. Get the heat away, then just stick splines all over.
http://www.niveusmedia.com/
Very nice.
As has been pointed out, the internal rights issues on TV are already enormous - far more so than with Movies or with Music.
The main distinction is geographic. An episode of prime time TV airs at different times in different parts of the world. This is done for numerous reasons, but generally, it results in the US getting the first run, and, say, Australia getting the show a week later - or even a season later.
If all of the sudden you can just download TV, the entire geography centric system dissapears. Local affiliates now have, essentially, no business (a problem they already face in Satellite, as any urban sat subscriber can tell you). Non-US local affiliates, facing the disadvantage of time delay, REALLY have no business now.
So follow it through. Information wants to be free, we all say. So people download Numb3rs anyway, because some guy with a PVR posts it somewhere (generally with the advertising intact). The "if everyone did this" argument essentially bankrupts the system - you may watch the ads, but you can no longer be counted. Advertisers won't pay you. Everyone rebells, overseas rights evaporate, and all of the sudden that show with a 1M per episode budget is simply impossible to fund.
Sure, long term, it's nice to think we could just pay directly for the content, but then we all have to get used to those "DRM" letters we seem to hate so much. Or we could say "but I'll watch the ads" to which the studio will say "yeah right" and force you to use a proprietary play system to ENFORCE you watching the ads.
It's vastly more complicated than music.
Umm, this is actually entirely incorrect. Microsoft is REQUIRING TPM hardware on next generation machines (Longhorn). Far from being abandoned, NGSCB is alive and well and coming soon to an update near you.
Love it or leave it's here. Dell started shipments on a substantial portion of their line YESTERDAY. You can stick your head in the sand, your you can help provide solutions. It's up to you.
It's substantially better than Doom 3 the video game. Maybe not as much eye candy, but vastly better gameplay. Kevin Wilson, the designer, is SOLID - he did Game of Thrones - the best wargame in years.
Gameplay is extremely good, and features a pretty innovative dice mechanism and a fair amount of roll playing flair. I played with several folks this weekend who wouldn't touch the videogame, and they were all pretty impressed.
It bogs a little with 4 players, but 2-3 it is truly an excellent game, and one you will be playing long after Doom3 is gathering dust.
I know we are all in love with linux here, and I played with Myth to, but there's a number you are missing here:
Microsoft MCE shipped 1.6 million units last year. Anyone care to guess how many WORKING Myth installations are out there?
It sucks (MCE) it really isn't that great. Putting sage or snapstream on top of Meedio is vastly superior. Myth can get SORT of close, if you are careful, and don't need to talk to any windows machines.
All of it kicks the crap out of Tivo
Non-conductive fluid is easy to find and relatively cheap. Just google Fluid XP.
Out of the money options are FAR from worthless, and there's a very large body of economics devoted to this:
http://bradley.bradley.edu/~arr/bsm/model.html
Most companies use black scholes (or the public options markets) to price their options for accounting purposes.
Sorry, the math is a LITTLE more complicated than everyone's making it out to be.
Not only is Online more about the math, but low limit online poker (1-2), 5 dollar SnG tourneys, etc. - is populated by the WORST shoot from the hip players. If you simply play simple tight poker, you generally grind out 10 bucks - 20 bucks an hour at those levels.
Once you go to real money - 50 tourneyes, 5-10 games, its very hard to win consistently - everyone at that level KNOWS the math.
As stated in other places, but to sum up:
Making quality visual content is not cheap and easy. It's MUCH harder than just writing a blog page, or pirating together a radio broadcast from your MP3 collection. Sure the tools make it theoretically easy, but the actual creative componant of making half an hour of something people really want to watch is daunting - this coming from someone who spent years doing it for "the man".
So in order for something like this to work, you need money. Thus, there has to be SOME sort of a business model, and I for one don't think the Public Radio Pledge Drive/paypal donate model is going to work here.
So if you spend money making good content, with the hopes of at least making a little money, guess what folks - DRM. Sorry, but it's true. You are actually going to have to pay for it.
All the comments about bandwidth are also true.
Look how much time and energy goes into making something like Red v. Blue - with no live video at all, and how short and simple it has to be. And call me a cynic, but I don't think those guys are rolling in dough, even with my paltry donation.
My point is that if someone would come out with a COMPONANT encoder that worked, we'd be set. Yes, you would lose a D/A conversion, but MOST people get at least one D/A conversoin between their cable/satellite box and their display anyway (even if they don't know it). Also, I can tell you from extensive testing that I at least can not tell ANY difference between a "direct" digital connection from the STB and a componant transcoded signal...
And QAM doesnt solve the encryption problem. Hence the need for a componant encoder.
It drives me nuts that people keep spending R&D money on Over-the-air tuner cards for HDTV. THere are plenty of these out there, and they all stink.
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we int he real world actually USE (cable and sattelite) into our boxes. Right now there is no way to do this without an insanely expensive Component encoder card.
AT BEST, with your HDTV OTA card you will get marginal quality from a handful of HDTV channels. With satellite or cable you will get dozens of absolutely pure channels - and you can't get them into your PVR.
GRrrrr.
I credit my pilot's license to flight sim time, definately, particularly navigation, radio management, and procedures. Had little to no impact on the PHYSICAL skill of flying.
However, RC airplane/helicopter simulators are absolutely invaluable. I wouldn't let my friend fly any of my planes till I watched him fly on the sim for an hour, and then he solod. And as far as helis go, anyone who tries to learn WITHOUT a sim is simply insane.
I believe the problem solving helps a lot too.
I went through all FOUR major offerings on this front, because, mostly, i didn't have to pay for extra OS licenses.
I built a machine for Myth, for Sage, for Snapstream, and for MCE. In the end, I stuck with snapstream.
MCE is a buggy piece of crap (surprise)
SageTV is nice, but fails the pretty/Wife Factor test quite badly, and has plenty of bugs of its own.
Snapstream has by far the most "tivolike" interface, and just plain does the job well.
Myth, if I NEVER, EVER had to have my wife and kids rely on it, would be nice, but I simply did not find the combo I got with my snapstream install.
If you are JUST going to do PVR, sure, its not THAT hard to get set up. But when you add playing DVD's, pushing a high def signal through a converter, playing MP3s, cutting DVDs from home movies, doing some light websurfing, actuing as the household firewall, the household fileserver, and being a KILLER gaming platform on a nice 50 inch HDTV, you're gonna end up with windows.
Bitch all you want, but add "killer gaming" and "easy to use all the other little crap" to the equation, and windows RAPIDLY becomes worth the license fee.
OK, so, a few MAJOR differences:
1: Australia pays an INSANE duty on imported music, to the point that when I lived there a few years ago, CD's from the US and UK cost TWICE as much as local fare. As such, it was ALREADY a culture in which people swapped tapes or (more likely) purchased all their music on overseas trips, particularly to asia, where it was ALL boot.
2: Bandwidth is by the byte.
Put these two together, and the stats don't add up.
Hey, I hate the RIAA as much as everyone else, but it baffles me that people can think that in the CURRENT status quo, the internet hasn't hurt CD sales. I've bought fewer CDs, everyone I know has bought fewer CD's. My babysitter has NEVER bought a CD. Neither the math nor the social motivation makes any sense.
On the other hand, the fact that 1980's CD sales we're likely artificially inflated by people "rebuying" their LP collections, never seems to be mentioned, and of course, just because people are buying fewer CDs doesnt mean they wouldnt follow some OTHER (itunes or whatever) business model.